Many individuals, businesses, and organizations occasionally have a need to purchase a quantity of custom printed materials, such as birth announcements, party invitations, product or service brochures, promotional postcards, personalized holiday cards, or any number of other things. Many of these individuals and businesses turn to sources such as a local print shop while others rely on any of the various specialized software products available for purchase and installation on an appropriate computer system.
To provide an alternative to the above approaches, printing service providers, taking advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers, provide document design services for user's desiring to create customized documents from any computer with Web access at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. These service providers typically provide their customers with the ability to access the service provider's web site, view product templates, and enter information to create a customized markup language document. In a typical Web-based system, editing is usually limited to allowing the user to add, modify and position text and perhaps upload images for incorporation into the product design. After a document has been designed by the user, Web-based service providers also typically allow the user to place an order for the production and delivery to the user's home or business of quantities of high quality, printed documents of the type that the user is not capable of producing with the printer systems typically connected to most personal computer systems.
Pre-designed document templates that can be individually selected and downloaded to assist the user in creating a personalized document in the user's browser are known in the art. Some service providers offer templates having similar designs for a range of products so that an individual or business can design and order different products, such as business cards, letterhead, brochures, presentation folders, and return address labels, that share a common look and style. For each type of product, a number of different templates with various images and design features are provided to offer the user a range of design choices.
Traditionally, the service provider has individually designed each template by defining all details of the template, such as the position of all image and text areas in the template, selecting, sizing and positioning images in the template, defining colors to be used for template elements having a color attribute, and so forth. The template designer adjusts the elements until the designer is satisfied with the overall appearance of the template. This hand crafting of template design is time consuming and, therefore, a significant expense for the service provider. A service provider may only have the resources to produce a limited number of template variations.
When the user selects a desired template, the information required to render the template is downloaded to the user's computer system along with downloaded software tools that can be employed by the user to create a personalized electronic document. For a two-sided product, such as a folded card, the templates for the front and the inside of the card are usually provided separately with the front being provided for editing first.
There is a need for a flexible electronic document editing and customization system that allows a user greater control over the selecting and modifying the content and appearance of the document template while maintaining consistency in the appearance and style of the entire document and providing the ability to extend the user's customized document design features to other user documents.